"There is no denying that Francis Drake was a pirate...But it was on the scale that transforms crime into politics."
--Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
I had this idea for a blog post about pirates in political thought, because there are a lot of pirates in political thought, and someone should write a dissertation on them, and it seemed like something FLG would like. But when I began to compose it, I thought: "Why would I give away my idea about pirates for free to teh internets? What if someone actually uses it? What if my dissertation project on a completely different topic falls through and I have to resort to using it myself, but someone else who happened to read my blog has already claimed it by then? What if that person becomes fabulously renowned (and wealthy) for his ground-breaking pirate scholarship, while I toil away in oblivion trying to come up with a new dissertation topic? WHAT IF THIS IS MY LAST IDEA EVER AND I NEVER HAVE ANOTHER IDEA AGAIN?? WON'T I BE SORRY FOR GIVING THIS ONE AWAY???"
Yes, I would. So, readers, I'm not going to tell you my idea about pirates in political thought after all. Don't worry, it wasn't really that good anyway. But this is why grad school and blogging are essentially incompatible. Instead, I will direct you to this very funny post about Paris Hilton's new TV show by Emily Hale.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
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10 comments:
Be on the lookout for FLG's upcoming book, Pirates in Political Theory. It's gonna be awesome and FLG will be famous and wealthy.
I hope by the time it comes out, he will have come up with a catchier title.
Boarding the Ship of State?
Blackbeard's Republic?
Privateers and Public Spheres?
The Concept of the Piratical.
Ok then, title's taken care of.
I sorta feel responsible for this. Did I make you self-conscious after I informed you that I might snatch that idea about the English garrison Utrecht?
MSI: i believe blogs are generally considered protected from copyright infringement now. Besides, you can then spend your dissertation attacking the other person's work. Talk about pirates all you want.
This seems to have been tried before:
The Concept of Piracy (1937)
Carl Schmitt
The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (2009)
Daniel Heller Roazen
Huh. Who knew? I don't know if that was quite my idea--that pirates are the universal enemy b/c of their lawlessness. That's true in Locke, where they initiate the state of war with, I guess, humanity on one side, and them on the other. But pre-Locke, piratical lawlessness seemed to be a litmus test for arguments about justice. When you ask, “How does this regime differ from piracy?”, you challenge a standing view of justice. In Thucydides, the Greeks stop being pirates when they establish laws; in Augustine, the Romans are pirates under their own laws until they accept the new justice of Christ. Even in Locke, before we get into questions about who can punish him, the pirate is specifically the person who disregards the sanctity life, liberty, and property, the regard for which is the sum of the natural law, or of justice.
In Schmitt/Roazen, the pirate is the proper enemy of liberalism. The problem is that liberals don't fight fair, so instead of making the customary distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the liberal British regime targets all alike via sea blockades. The pirate breaking the sea blockade, as the enemy of the liberal regime, is the kind of enemy that liberalism would deserve, if liberalism were capable of having an enemy. But the pirate is not a political enemy since liberalism, based on individualism and not on a properly political principle, does not have a political form or an enemy. And as the pirate is to the sea embargo, the terrorist is to the deterritorialised jet and atomic age. Something like that.
Your idea sounds more interesting.
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